• Socio-ecologicl factors affecting natural resource efficiency of nations

• What are the societal and environmental conditions that help national economies increase the efficiency with which they use natural resources to achieve social, economic and environmental outcomes?

• Opportunity provided by a globl dataset accounting for structure of material conumption in the global economy of more than 150 nations.

• (Comparing evidence for some long-standing hypotheses)

• background

• macroecology

• two challenges for a macro-socio-ecology

• technical

• conceptual

• a bit of data to ponder

• macroecology and evolutionary biology
• climate change impacts on wildlife
• applied evolutionary biology
• next-generation ecology

• activity requires energy

• earth has an environmental carrying capacity for humans (AKA planetary boundaries)

• How do general patterns of ecology relate to the real world?

  • How can their real world relevance be improved?

  • Decrease social naivity?

• How does natural resource use relate to social, enviornmental, economic outcomes?

• How efficient is resource extraction with regard to impact on environment?

• How does social, environmental, economic factors affect efficiency?

• Technical Globalization of the economy influences the structure of consumption

  • sub-global scale

• Conceptual Integrate social aspects into human macroecology

  • e.g. how we use resources to achieve social outcomes

  • local to global scale

• Take advantage of improvements in measuring consumption in the globalized economy

• Compare long-standing "socio-ecological" hypotheses from across disciplines on trends in structure

• measuring consumption based on import-export statistics

"Trends show that resource productivity measured in this way" … ", suggesting that a relative, and even absolute, decoupling of economic growth and resource use has been achieved."

"However, the scope of these measures is limited to the amount of materials directly used by an economy. It does not include the upstream raw materials related to imports and exports originating from outside of the focal economy." (Wiedmann et al. 2013)

• global value chains

• improvements

• macroecology

• Environmental quality and per capita GDP (Environmental Kuznets Curve)

  • environmental pollution has an inverse "U" shape with affluence

• small scale and simple interactions

• Contested field

• Disparate methodologies

Some existing macro-scopic frameworks

• Environmental impact
  • IPAT (including Kaya identities)
  • Planetary boundaries
• Social
  • Social IPAT = DPAE
  • Raworth's social foundation
• Environmental and social
  • Comprehensive wealth
  • Genuine Progress Indicator
  • The planetary doughnut

• "Sustainability is demonstrated by showing that a properly defined comprehensive measure of wealth is maintained through time."

  • Value, sum of natural, human and reproducible capital
  • Does not address natural resource efficiency per se

• Personal Consumption Expenditures adjusted for 24 components, e.g. income distribution, environmental costs, negative activities (e.g. crime, pollution), positive components (e.g. benefits of volunteering and household work)

  • Valuation approach
  • Meaning of sum … ?

• Not meant to be an indicator of sustainability. Measure of economic welfare, needs to be viewed alongside other indicators, e.g. biophysical.

  • Does not address natural resource efficiency per se

(Kubiszewski et al. 2013)

• Doughnut economics

  • Operationalization?

• D / I

• Development outcome per cumulative environmental change

  • environmental impact hard to assign due to globalized supply chains and poor monitoring

• Alternative: Development outcome / consumed resources

• how does change in national consumption contribute to?

  • shape of income distribution

  • median income

  • health & well-being

  • Human Development Index?

  • etc. etc.

• general picture

• increased development requires resources?

• when GDP goes up national energy consumption increases

• … but not always

• change in Human Development Index and Ecological Footprint between 1980 and 2010 (Steffen et al. 2011)

• change in human development index and material footprint between 1990 and 2008

• change in GDP and material footprint between 1990 and 2008

• hard to address consumption due to globalization

• how does change in national extraction contribute to?

  • a stronger test of the EKC?

  • preservation of biodiversity, environment and ecosystem services

    • land cover change

    • biodiversity

• Technical status: Major improvements in addressing technical challenge

• Conceptual status: Conceptual challenge is only starting to be addressed

• The need Faciltating imagining a better future

• GCIP
  • Global Reach
  • Community Participation
  • Continuous Innovation
  • Open Platform

• "driving"" factors
  • demography (increase by necessity)
  • size of macroeconomic sectors (increase by choice/necessity)
  • personal income (increase by choice)
  • resource endowments (delay subsidization - cite Galli 2014 paper)
  • international resource security (the stability of resource supply and prices from potential donors)
  • impacts of resource extraction and processing
  • culture
  • domestic conflict e.g. violent conflicts such as civil war

• change in human development index and energy consumption between 1980 and 2008